Why Microsoft is Buying Skype for $8.5 Billion

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#nowlistening Zomby, Natalia's Song, new one sided promo 10" from 4AD in advance of new album. Sounds like Arvo Pärt playing with a sampler.

Where is Ai Weiwei?

Ai Weiwei in Beijing earlier this year. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

It is, as I write, 37 days since Ai Weiwei disappeared, arrested by the Chinese police on 3 April in Beijing as he was about to board a scheduled flight for Hong Kong. He has not been seen or heard from since. He has not had access to a lawyer (Ai's own lawyer disappeared for five days following the artist's arrest), and despite persistent enquiries his family do not know where he is.
Another question. Who is Ai Weiwei? As well as an artist, Ai is an architect, designer, activist, iconoclast, blogger, sometime antiques dealer and expert blackjack player. If the Chinese authorities who have arrested him and engineered his disappearance are right, this creative, complicated man is also a bigamist, involved in tax fraud, the distribution of pornography, and – laughably – a plagiarist.
There is no currently no news on Ai's condition, only rumour, including an unconfirmed and appalling graphic report, by a disaffected Xinhua journalist writing under a pseudonym, that Ai has been tortured, and has begun to confess to his supposed crimes. Meanwhile, his art has been shipped abroad, to London and New York and Switzerland. Two exhibitions of his work open in London this week. Twelve zodiac animal heads will be unveiled in the Somerset House courtyard tomorrow; these are oversized bronze replicas of figures originally sculpted by the Italian Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) as a water clock for the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan, Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong's summer retreat. In 1860, the palace was ransacked by French and British troops, and the heads were pillaged. Two ended up in the collection of Yves Saint Laurent; the current Chinese government has been trying to retrieve them. What goes around comes around. A second show of Ai's sculptures and videos opens on Thursday at the Lisson Gallery.
Meanwhile, there have been protests by the German, American, British and other governments. There are petitions and protests and a Free Ai Weiwei website, where information is gathered. A young woman in Hong Kong has been spraying "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" on the city's buildings, risking a punitive jail sentence. Tate Modern has "Release Ai Weiwei" written in huge letters along its exterior. Anish Kapoor has dedicated his Monumenta exhibition, which opens tomorrow at Paris's Grande Palais, to Ai. There have been moments of silence and noisy demonstrations, letters to the press from Salman Rushdie and a long interview in Germany with the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, who said that on his most recent visit to Beijing he had urged Ai to keep his head down or to leave the country.
Ai did neither. "What can they do to me? Nothing more than to banish, kidnap or imprison me. Perhaps they could fabricate my disappearance into thin air, but they don't have any creativity or imagination, and they lack both joy and the ability to fly," he wrote on his blog in November 2009, when he was already being harassed and having his bank accounts investigated. CCTV cameras mounted by the authorities outside his Beijing studio had monitored his comings and goings for years. He even made a sculpture of one such camera, a replica carved from a single piece of marble. "I believe," the artist continued on his blog, "that no matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy."
In Ai's Remembering (2009), 9,000 children's backpacks mounted on the exterior wall of the Haus der Kunst in Munich spell out the sentence: "She lived happily for seven years in this world." The idea came from the artist's visit to Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake. Seeing the collapsed school buildings, Ai said: "You could see bags and study materials everywhere . . . The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything." In 1995, he had himself photographed dropping an ancient Han Dynasty urn, smashing it on the floor. He had a similarly ancient vessel decorated with the Coca Cola logo. Both works speak of the disregard paid to history during China's recent past, and of the selling of the past as though it were a brand. Questions of value – of unique and irreplacable artefacts, and of individual human lives – are recurrent themes. What at first appeared as acts of cultural, bad-boy vandalism have turned out to be bitter statements about the state of things.
Continued after jump

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Louisiana Man Gets Life Sentence...for 2lbs of Weed

In a prime example of this nation's outrageous, upside-down-and-backwards drug stance, a New Orleans man was slapped with a life sentence for possessing just two pounds of marijuana - all because it was his fourth offense. Louisiana is a state practicing 'three strikes,' a law that's notoriously harsh on small-time drug criminals and emphasizes unceremonious society-removal over the more productive (and cheaper) rehabilitation.
Cornell Hood II, 35, had been arrested three times before for marijuana possession with intent to distribute, but in each case the judge handed down a deferred five-year sentence, with probation. In September, however, his probation officer visited Hood's home and discovered bags of marijuana totaling just up to two pounds -- his fourth offense.

At Hood's one-day trial, the evidence presented by the prosecution included a digital scale and about a dozen bags that had contained marijuana before being seized from the house, testimony showed. Deputies also found $1,600 in cash and a student-loan application with Hood's name on it inside of a night stand.

A jury found him guilty in February and last week, a judge handed down the lifetime sentence -- all for the infraction of one count of possession with intend to distribute. Such an extreme sentence for such a relatively harmless, victimless crime shows exactly how screwed up the justice system's priorities can be with regards to marijuana laws...

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd @'AlterNet'

Samoa to jump forward in time by one day

The South Pacific island nation of Samoa is to jump forward in time by one day in order to boost its economy.
Samoa will do this by switching to the west side of the international date line, which it says will make it easier for it to do business with Australia and New Zealand.
At present, Samoa is 21 hours behind Sydney. From 29 December it will be three hours ahead.
The change comes 119 years after Samoa moved in the opposite direction.
Then, it transferred to the east side of the international date line in an effort to aid trade with the US and Europe.
However, Australia and New Zealand have increasingly become Samoa's biggest trading partners.
Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said: "In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week.
"While it's Friday here, it's Saturday in New Zealand and when we're at church Sunday, they're already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane."
Samoa is located approximately halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii and has a population of 180,000 people.
@'BBC'

Reuters says:

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Ai Weiwei chat with opinion manipulator surfaces

00:04 AM GMT (10th May 2011)

thinq_, unfortunally you have been trolled. Ryan clearly had no intention to do anything for Anonymous... EVER, he was only ever here to boost his own ego. There is no "leadership", Ryan seems to be mistaking "leadership" with people who actually get of their ass and do stuff (and not just treating other users with contempt). To add further to the point of "leadership", network staff have a hard enough time trying to keep the network functional and stable, let alone leading a PR campaign.
Ryan talks about how he wanted to show how insecure AnonOps was, and yet he was an oper (Network admin) for over 5 months. You would of thought he would have bolstered security if he considered it inadequate. He talks about the "incompetence" of other opers, but it would appear this is merely a distraction from his own shortfalls.
Moving onto the database of leaked IP's. Ryan had been a network administrator on AnonOps since december (going under the name of V), since that time he had achieved a level of trust. It's this trust he exploited. There was no wholesale lapse in security, or critical vulnerability. As with many things its just the human element coming into play. It would be no different from a disillusioned employee releasing the photocopies after the christmas party. Embarassing, yes - catastrophic, no. As seen in recent copywrong cases, an IP doesn't equal a person, in the same way a blurry photocopy of someones ass is unlikely to prove who they are.
Finally, AnonOps is hoping to get some basic functionality within the next 12 hours.
P.S: Also names from the original post are removed as they were only added to be some "proof" of authenticity (users may have done !staff and seen one or more of these names), as without a formalized blog/bulletin, there is was no easy was to make users aware of the seriousness of the message. Seeing as it's now established that news will be here for the time being, this is no longer necessary
P.P.S: Should *.anonops.in stop resolving then further news will be on anonops.li